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Comment by lr | Hacker News Reader

First off, I “hate” Excel, but only because people misuse it. It, like so many other products of its kind, are for numbers! Yet I would be hard-pressed to find someone actually using it for numbers. People absolutely insist on using it as a generic table system for holding non-number data.

I recently had to show a 20+ year Excel-using fanatic how to import data from a CSV file so that they could select as type Text columns that contain leading zeros. The ability exists, but I have found scant few people who know how to actually use the product properly.

Oh, and I also work in healthcare.

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Excel supports a variety of data types other than numbers and includes many built in functions for dealing with non-numeric data. Whatever it's history, it is not accurate to say that it is only for numbers.

Regardless of its _additional_ support for other types, those are only in support of its primary role as a spreadsheet. It is designed around the concept of plugging in _numbers_ and calculating with them. Everything else is to make those calculations well notated and human friendly.

Any other use of Excel is bending it into a role it wasn't intended for, and user beware.

And it is all too easy to just go there since there are soooo many convenience features for those who don't want to laern how to do the tasks well.

If notation were the sole purpose there'd be little need for anything but row and column labels or simple string input. Instead there's a full set of string manipulation tools, embedding of other objects, charts, images, drawings etc.

You are taking the application as it existed 35 years ago and saying it must still be that thing, yet it has had 35 years to evolve far beyond that. Microsoft itself, when it talks about Excel, talks about using it to organize "data", not just numerics data. It has become a more general purpose tool.

As a lay-person, what would you use for non numbers tabular data?

People love to use Excel to look at (with their eyes, or a screen reader, i.e., non programmatically) all kinds of data. They use it to list exports from data stores, and then take notes on what they discovered, show and hide data using the filter option, etc. It is just far too easy to use (and misuse) that it ends up being used for any type of data that fits into a table.

Excel have lots of different uses. It can be used as inventory tracking, sales, catalog, mileages, contact list, and the list goes on. It is useful in many different fields and industries.

You have to remember, Excel is extremely powerful beast. It have many specialized features that will handle any data it encountered with. I used Excel for 15 years and I am still finding features that made the process quicker. Of course, Excel have its limits and I am well aware of that.

I mean I thought you said that they should not use excel for these scenarios, but something else. So I thought you had an alternative software in mind?

I use Splunk (our organization pays lots of money for it, and yet it just sits there because people would rather use Excel). There is also Tableau and other products like it. Most of these tools have a free version, as well. They take some learning, but it is well worth it. Of course, taking that same amount of time to actually learn how Excel works is worth the time, too. I guess the issue is that Excel is just too "easy" to use, and hence people using it for years and years and not actually knowing how to use it.

I am not trying to be an elitist about this. It is just that the misuse of Excel (because people do not know how to use it) causes massive issues on a daily basis.

I haven't used it much myself, but I think Access is meant to answer this question.

Excel is fine, but keep the data as xls and you won't have problems like dropping leading zeros. As soon as you convert to a simpler file format like cvs, you will likely lose data unless you are very careful in both export and import.

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